infoTECH Feature

The Echo Nest Raises $17.3 Million Financing to Fund Continued International Sales Growth

The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform, has raised $17.3 million in financing. The Echo Nest is planning to utilize the funds to support continued sales growth, international expansion, and new product development. Financing was raised during a round led by Norwest Venture Partners. Before this, investors Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Fringe Partners, Jim Pallotta and board member Michael Brown (News - Alert) also participated in this round.

This latest round of funding will support the Echo Nest in strengthening its market-leading position with a focus on international sales and marketing. The funds will also be used for continued development of "Fanalytics", data-driven solutions that help leading media companies better understand music fans. The Echo Nest is announcing two product improvements to Fanalytics- Taste Profile Similarity and “affinity prediction”. Taste Profile Similarity is a new data service that offers applications and music services the capability to connect like-minded fans by determining their overall musical compatibility within a larger group. The company’s "affinity prediction" helps organization understand how music preference is predictive of other media preferences and psychographic attributes.

In a press release, Jeff Crowe, managing partner at Norwest Venture Partners, said, “The Echo Nest has distinguished itself as the clear market-leading data company focused on the most pervasive form of entertainment consumption: music. We are very excited about the company's business model of exploiting the data opportunity around music consumption, the team's excellent progress in inking a steady stream of industry-leading customers, and the large market opportunity in understanding digital consumers' musical identity on a mass scale.”

The Echo Nest is involved in offering open, API-based access to the largest repository of dynamic music data in the world, with over one trillion data points. Its tools allow media companies and independent developers to build intelligence about music content and music fans into applications to make them more engaging.

The Echo Nest was recently in news when it incorporated Discogs into its Rosetta Stone platform, a universal music data translator that facilitates “big data” integration into apps on all platforms. This allows developers to access all of that data at a deep level, safe in the knowledge that they're matching the appropriate artists on Twitter (News - Alert), Facebook, or Spotify to Discogs' extensive information on music releases.

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